2001 Free Software Awards

Description of Award Ceremony

The 2001 Free Software Foundation Award Ceremony was held Free and
Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium
on 16 February 2002. The ceremony was held in collaboration with the
Free Software Foundation
Europe.

FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presented the award to
Guido van Rossum for inventing and implementing as Free Software the
Python programming language.

A committee of Free Software pioneers and leaders selected the winner
and two other finalists from the scores of mostly volunteer
programmers worldwide who dedicate their time to advancing Free
Software. The selection committee included: Miguel de Icaza, Ian
Murdock, Eric Raymond, Peter Salus, Vernor Vinge, and Larry Wall.
Prior to committee deliberations, a two month open nominations process
decided the list from which the committee chose these finalists.

Guido van Rossum was chosen from three finalists for the award. The
other finalists were L. Peter Deutsch, for his work on GNU
Ghostscript, the popular Postscript emulation program for GNU/Linux,
and Andrew Tridgell, for his work on Samba, a Microsoft Windows
network file system emulation program.

This was the fourth award of this kind. The prior winners were Larry
Wall, Miguel de Icaza, and Brian Paul.

A Full press release for the event is available in
English and in
French.

About FOSDEM

FOSDEM's goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers
and communities the opportunity to learn and discuss the latest
developments in the Free Software and Open Source arena and to promote
the development and the benefits of Free Software and Open Source
solutions.